When I was around 10 years old I used to love going to the supermarket with my mother. I was a latchkey kid, so it was a treat both to spend time with her and get out of the house on a weeknight. My mom always shopped on weeknights to avoid the crowds. As I got older and became an unruly teenager, our relationship grew more strained, so those evenings I spent pushing her shopping cart down the aisles at the market will always have a special place in my memory. It seems like a trivial thing, buying groceries with mom, but as shopping increasingly moves online, it’s one more thing that will likely slip away.

The technology crowd loves to revel in the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, as if we were watching the fall of the Berlin wall. We say things like, “they deserve to fail” and point to the struggles of Best Buy and bankrupt retailers such as Borders as proof that selling things via the Internet is superior in every way. While I try to avoid the schadenfreude, I admit I’ve engaged in plenty of “showrooming” and consider myself an Amazon fan.

But the rise of Internet retailing is not just a matter of saving money. As with most economic shifts, there are side effects that go far beyond the obvious winners and losers of who’s selling what to whom. And as more and more retailing moves online, the biggest casualties may not be Best Buy or Circuit City, but our communities and perhaps even the relationships we share with one another.

To get a glimpse of how ecommerce affects communities, we need only look at Walmart. For the past couple of decades we’ve watched how the arrival of Walmart in small towns has often resulted in the bankrupting of local businesses and, many would say, the gutting of those communities. Much like online retailers, Walmart’s defense is to argue that they offer lower prices and a better selection to the consumer. While this argument is well supported, it doesn’t change the fact that many towns have lost their base of local businesses and the sense of community that once surrounded Main Street.

For many people, stores are a place for them to interact, a destination where you can take your kids or run into your neighbors. Even an impersonal corporate supermarket like the one where my mother shopped is still a place where she and I spent time together. Whatever Walmart takes from the communities it enters, at least it is still a physical place that employs the local population. While its fluorescent lit aisles may not be as pleasant as the small town store, they still provide a location for people to meet. The Internet provides neither local employment nor a physical presence to replace the stores that it renders unprofitable, and as such, the shift to ecommerce poses a threat to communities on a scale far greater than Walmart ever has.

I’m not arguing for the demise of Amazon or online shopping. As I mentioned, I’m a fan. But I do wonder with concern what will happen to our communities when the stores are gone. What will become of those trips to the store that kids take with their parents? With no more physical bookstores, will father/daughter night at Barnes and Noble be replaced with dads forgoing that time with their kids in favor of giving them access to one click Amazon purchases?

Many will argue that you don’t need physical stores in order to have a relationship with your family or build a community. On its face, this is obviously true. But from a practical standpoint, stores and malls are where we spend our time. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the trend of younger generations seeking attention on the Web in part due to a lack of attention paid to them by their parents. I wonder how many hours of time a kid today no longer spends with her parents because there are no more trips to mall. What choices for interaction do they really have when the physical world around them is fading into bankruptcy?

I realize the survival of brick-and-mortar stores isn’t the concern of technology entrepreneurs. The development of the Internet created a new platform for commerce, and this is the natural progression of business. But instead of blindly cheering like an angry mob for the misfortune of physical retailers, we should think about what it really means for our communities. Physical stores are much more than just a place to buy things. They are a place to meet, a place to go, and often the anchor of a neighborhood. For me, they were the place where I have some of the fondest memories of spending time with my mother, and ecommerce, no matter how cheap or convenient, can never replace that time well spent.

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]

Amazon isn’t happy that the Federal Aviation Administration wants to restrict how, when, and where it tests the drones it hopes will deliver packages some time in the future. So it’s opened a secret test facility in British Columbia where it can operate without pesky regulators worrying about drones falling out of the sky and hurting bystanders. [Source: The Guardian]

GitHub has been the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack over the last few days, perhaps because the Chinese government wants to prevent anti-censorship tools hosted on the service from spreading. The company now says that it’s able to operate despite the attacks, albeit with intermittent outages. [Source: Reuters]